Egypt's Arab Investment Bank and the private sector arm of the Islamic Development Bank will launch an Islamic leasing firm in the third quarter, aiming to provide sharia-compliant financing to small businesses.

A group of foreign medical students, including seven Britons, an American and a Canadian, are thought to have travelled to Syria to work in hospitals controlled by Islamic State, a Turkish member of parliament in the border region said on Sunday.

Compared with Brasilia in Brazil, which was founded in 1960, Canberra in Australia, founded in 1913, and Astana, which became the administrative centre of Kazakhstan in 1997, Egypt's ambitions are on an even larger scale. Its new capital is eventually designed to cover some 700 sq km (435 sq miles), roughly the size of Singapore, contain 1.1 million homes and create 1.75 million jobs.